The Visual Landscape of Waste in Mexico City: Initial Approaches

Humanities Future at the Franklin Humanities Institute (Duke University)

This article addresses the concept of trash from both an environmental and biopolitical perspective. It underscores the importance of trash in our daily lives as a key component of modern technology, habits of consumption, and disposability. The article draws from three case studies in order to examine the different representations of aesthetic material where both the destruction and preservation of the environment is an important component. Focused on Latin American cultural production, it looks at literary and visual narratives through the scope of sustainability, addressing specifically the practice of recycling and reusing. It states that residual culture in Latin America is located at the intersections of trash production, globalization, and urban environments. If Latin American cities are the privileged spaces of modernity, they have also become sites of large-scale waste generation. Because of this, they represent critical spaces of environmental degradation, with large residual concentrations that pose a real health threat for the surrounding populations who are often among the underrepresented. The central thrust of this article is that trash matters because it is at the core of both the constitution and decomposition of modernity. The cases analyzed in this paper are the documentary Boca de Lixo (Mouth of garbage, 1993), by Eduardo Coutinho; the novel Única mirando al mar (Única gazing at the sea, 1994), by Costa Rican Fernando Contreras Castro; and Argentine painter Antonio Berni’s series on “Juanito Laguna” and “Ramona Montiel,” among others. This article calls for an interdisciplinary approach to environmental humanities that takes into account a new epistemology.

Visualizing Loss in Latin America. Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment, 2023

This book is the result of an ecocritical reading of a wide range of texts—from brief tales and short stories to chronicles, plays, and novels—as well as documentaries and feature films, works of art and urban performances. Despite this broad range of source materials, they are all anchored in a specific territory: the space of the Latin American city from the early twentieth century to the present. Through an interdisciplinary analytical methodology, the proposed reading draws from ecocriticism as a tool of literary and cultural inquiry all the while interrogating the extent to which this critical apparatus—originating and circulating in Anglo-American scholarship—can account for a Latin American phenomenon. This sweeping introduction proposes the conditions for a specifically Latin American ecocriticism that distances itself, through its singular characteristics, from those proposals principally formulated in the disciplinary field coming from English-speaking studies. It argues that the aesthetic productions analyzed in this book operate at the intersections of biopolitics and ecocriticism, placing Latin American figurations within a bioecocritical paradigm that defines the material conditions of human and non-human relational networks while constituting different meanings and enabling new forms of understanding.

A Contracorriente, 2022

Global Garbage: Urban Imaginaries of Waste, Excess and Abandonment, 2016

“Waste Not Want Not: Garbage and the Philosopher of the Dump (Waste Land and Estamira)”. In Christoph Lindner and Miriam Meissner, eds, Global Garbage: Urban Imaginaries of Waste, Excess and Abandonment (London: Routledge, 2016), 52-67.

Purity and Danger Now: New Perspectives, 2016

The ambiguities of cleanliness and dirt in relation to urban pollution highlight social hierarchies, power and inequalities. We argue that pollution can serve as a lens through which to examine the politics and social construction of differences and help us to understand the complex web of social relations through which individuals constitute their daily lives.

This article focuses on debates over the place and value of waste and waste scavengers in Buenos Aires during and following the economic crisis of 2002 in order to consider how waste functions as a fundamental category for organizing social space. I argue that conceptualizations ofwaste as both zero value and “matter out of place” need to be combined with a recognition of the commodity potential of waste in order to better understand how waste works to constitute social structures and space. I demonstrate that while the displacement of waste and waste scavengers associated with the crisis opened a space for the transformation of established social relations, in ongoing negotiations, waste continues to be defined as that which belongs elsewhere and is of no value, reinforcing the marginalization of garbage scavengers.

Environmental Cultural Studies Through Time: The Luso-Hispanic World, 2019

For Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the threshold is a key textual and conceptual element that marks the limit where inclusion and exclusion enter into a zone of indistinction, a zone where bodies are subjected to the machinations of sovereign power, but where the potential for new social arrangements exists as well. In this essay, I mobilize Agamben’s conceptualization of the threshold in order to analyze two works from Brazil and Argentina that portray the phenomenon of scavenging, a feature of urban life that has become more visible and widespread in cities like Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires as a result of the economic and social crises of the neoliberal era. Eduardo Coutinho’s documentary film Boca de Lixo (1993) and Alicia Dujovne Ortiz’s book ¿Quién mató a Diego Duarte? (2010) are both works of nonfiction that approach the portrayal of the lives of people who work in trash dumps with complexity and self-reflection. My reading of the film and the crónica proposes that trash is the material manifestation of a threshold that opens onto a form of collective life based not on preconceived notions of essentialized identity, but rather on what Agamben theorizes as “inessential commonality” in his work The Coming Community. The communities portrayed by Coutinho and Dujovne Ortiz emerge from the nexus of ecological, socioeconomic, and political catastrophes materialized in the garbage dump at the same time that they resist the forces that normalize those catastrophes.